Is Ad-Blocking Hacker Making Your Web Browser Paranoid?

Advertisements have been quite common on the internet for many years now. Website and business owners consider them absolutely necessary for their website’s popularity and funding while casual users are generally of the opinion that advertisements are annoying. However, it cannot be ignored that advertisements are a vital part of the internet in today’s world.

Need for Ad-Blocking

Although advertisements initially were only considered annoying by everyday users of the internet, their opinions about advertisements gained more resentment when malicious advertisements are starting popping up on the internet with increasing frequency. Malicious advertisements lead you to a web page that either trick you into buying software that you don’t need by showing you fake reports about your system being infected by malware. Worse still, many such pages hijack your system when you visit them.

One of the earliest known incidents of this happening was in 2009 when The New York Times was serving an ad that would redirect users to a web page which gave them the fake report that their system is already infected but instead hijacked their system. Other news websites like BBC and the Times have also served many malicious advertisements over the years. The situation had worsened so much that between mid-2014 and 2016 a 325% increase in the number of malicious ads on the internet.

It was due to this increase in the number of malicious ads that ad-blocking became so common. The ad-blocking software would block all advertisements in your browser to prevent you from seeing any ads. As can be understood, this led to much discomfort for the website and business owners for whom advertisements are the primary source of revenue. Browser plug-ins and other ad-blocking software would block any and every ad on the internet as well as tracking websites that track your movement on the internet.

Modern Ad-blocking strategy

However, hacker Yan Zhu, who has dedicated the last three years of her life to making browsers less credulous believes that newer kind of ad-blocking strategies need to be used that can help establish a common ground between website owners from whom ads are the primary source of revenue and everyday users who are fed up with malicious advertisements compromising their system. Initially, Yan helped the Electric Frontier Foundation out in building the Privacy Badger software which blocked tracking websites.

But since this software blocked ads as a side effect she joined Brave Software, a company that developed browsers that not only blocked ads but replaces them with ads that respect your privacy. This is an effective strategy when it comes to having ads but not at the cost of them costing your privacy or the security of your system. Since modern malicious advertisements can manipulate your browser’s activity, the effort to make your browser paranoid about advertisements is indeed a good practice.

Paranoia, in general, is a good practice when it comes to security because it helps you stay vigilant and protect yourself. This is a lesson that Yan Zhu learnt when some of her colleagues were questioned in the WikiLeaks case simply because they bulk shared an email with those involved in the incident to some extent.

Conclusion

This article saw why ad-blocking is a necessary tool to be used in today’s world and why having a different breed of ad-blocking tools and software that protect you from malicious ads but let the privacy respecting ads to do their work is a good strategy.